Skepticism

EVENTS

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

That quote is from a good article in Nature on how sex is non-binary — my only quibble would be with that “now”. You’d have to define “now” as a window of time that encompasses the entirety of my training and work in developmental biology, and I’m getting to be kind of an old guy. Differences in sex development (DSDs) are common knowledge, and rather routine — and coincidentally, I’m giving an exam on sex chromosome anomalies today.

The article works through a lot of basic concepts: chimeric sex, genetic vs. cellular vs. organismal sex, and the development of sexual characters. I was so happy that they did not trigger one of my pet peeves, the claim that we all start out as female — we don’t, we start out sexually indifferent.

That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not. Five weeks into development, a human embryo has the potential to form both male and female anatomy. Next to the developing kidneys, two bulges known as the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing: the epididymes, vas deferentia and seminal vesicles. At six weeks, the gonad switches on the developmental pathway to become an ovary or a testis. If a testis develops, it secretes testosterone, which supports the development of the male ducts. It also makes other hormones that force the presumptive uterus and Fallopian tubes to shrink away. If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither. The sex hormones also dictate the development of the external genitalia, and they come into play once more at puberty, triggering the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair.

That’s exactly right.

The major point of the article is something a lot of people deny: that sex is complicated, there’s more than two states of human existence, and most importantly, that biology verifies the existence of a continuum of sexual differentiation. Drag this article out next time someone tries to argue that biology supports their simplistic version of a discrete sexual dichotomy.

Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person’s sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

I’ll also add that it’s not just biology that supports the idea that sex is a spectrum. It’s also the case of psychology and sociology — any science that has to address sex differences.

Comments

I teach an entire semester-long nonmajors science class devoted to the subject of sex/reproduction, how it evolved, and how many varieties of sex and sexes there are. Humans are only the last couple of lectures in the semester, and one of my major learning goals for the class is that by the time we get to people, they understand that male-female-sex-baby is only a drop in the bucket of possibilities. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach, and I wish there was a textbook that covered that topic that way. It annoys me that so many people think it is so simple and binary, when there is so much evidence to the contrary.
(Big shout-out to CatieCat, who specifically gave me pointers on how to address trans issues in a better way than I had been, and also to everyone else who has schooled me on the topic, here and elsewhere)

My sci-fi nerdity reveals it self so blatantly in this subject. With zilch knowledge of the genetic mechanism of sex definitions, I fall back to the Varley Sci-fi Titan/Demon/Wizard trilogy where the Titanians where 3-sexed Centaurs. When I first read the Titan novel, I was completely gobsmacked at such a possible biology. Making them Centaurs was Varley’s method of suspending disbelief; as centaurs are a morphological mix of two creatures (human and horse) with each half having reproductive organs, the combinations are quadrupled.
[slight digression follows:]
Varley was such a creative, he reduced doctors to technicians, but they could move brains from one body to another, or simply change a body with a particular set of genitalia and reproduction organs into the other variety, easy peasy.

It’s so ridiculous that even though we know it’s wrong, we still use these unrealistic cultural notions. I feel similarly about people using paraphyletic groups in colloquial language xD. What use is getting bew and better information if you are not going to implement it? I don’t understand this… The whole point of learning new stuff is supossed to be to correct and update the old stuff, for the better….but we don’t, we latch on to the old even when we know it makes no sense.
It’s interesting that this appears to happen more frequently with biological facts than with other fields…people are happy to change and update their vocabulary and believes about other subjects, but are very reluctant to have their ideas about biology changed…I expect this is because it is so fundamental…

carlie @2, I blush. Thank you, very much. It means a lot to me – I’ve been a bit sad lately that I ever revealed my transness online, as it’d be nice to be thought of as Cait, and not as “my trans friend Cait”. But since I did, it’s nice to know it’s at least been of value to someone. :)

Informative and enlightening article. Yet I’m skeptical that it will change the hearts and minds of those who adopt a simplistic views of gender dichotomy based on biology. Indeed even articles such as this which address the biological basis of gender can be misused to justify bigotry. On either side of the nature/nurture spectrum there are potentials for assholism whether its genetics leading to eugenics or social construction leading to conversion therapy. Our highest morals with notions of respect, tolerance, etc. of each other and our differences are apriori to any stated facts in science journals.

Yep, this article is definitely going in my bookmarks folder. I don’t think it will change the minds of those who act essentially like Creationists, but with sex and gender instead of evolution, but having solid science is always good.

Also, the article still hits various always-repeated irritants for me, though fewer than it could; for example, “That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not.” There are so many problems with this. First, obvious to whom? Especially in the context of point two: “the two sexes” replicates the same false essentialist binary the article is purporting to dismantle. And “physically different” how? With respect to almost any particular characteristic, I can find an individual categorized as male and an individual categorized as female with identical expressions of that characteristic (chromosome patterning or gonad configuration may be exceptions for some sex categorization schemata, but not even those are definitive differences for every schema we use). Finally, that “two sexes” bit implies a standardized, universal definition of “sex”, but there isn’t one, not even in biology (there are in fact several), which is another thing the article itself is supposed to be addressing. The article, to Ainsworth’s credit, actually contradicts the elements of this sentence to which I object later, which makes me question why it’s sitting there in all its binary-essentialist glory in the first place.

Also, the article still hits various always-repeated irritants for me, though fewer than it could; for example, “That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not.” There are so many problems with this.

This jumped out at me, too. Irritating as it is, the article is a good start, though. Here in the States, there is so much bigotry and resistance to anyone outside the handy dandy gender box, that it will take repeated gentling (like in the article), to get the idea across to the majority of people.

CaitieCat – given that I’m such an academic nerd, I think of you more as “expert-on-trans-issues Cait” with a far secondary link to the fact that part of why you’re such an expert is that you are trans. Not sure if that makes a difference, but “smart person who knows stuff and explains it well” is how you’re formulated in my mind.

azhael – I’ll defend common use of paraphyletic groups to my dying breath. Biological relatedness isn’t the only, or even primary, consideration when talking about lots of different topics, so it makes sense to group by other categories as well. If I’m talking about ecological roles and niches, you bet I’m going to talk about mosses and liverworts as a group of plants that don’t have vascular tissue and therefore are short and live in moist areas. Forcing only monophyletic groups for discussion would be like trying to talk about the political views of some ultraconservatives by piecing it out into family groups instead of using a more relevant factor like “alums of Liberty University” as a group signifier.

The Mellow Monkey @ # 15: Why would a trait that can be exhibited by any sex be evidence that one sex is developmentally dominant?

As nipples are (except for rare circumstances) only functional on females, their existence on males supports the idea that we start out on a female template, modified by later development for those individuals who function reproductively as sperm distributors.

I have also seen it claimed that the XX/XY chromosome pattern (the Y is much smaller than the X, not just the 25% fewer pixels implied by the letter analogy) indicates that males are a variation of the core female pattern. Our esteemed host knows much more than I about this, of course, but I can’t accept his authority without asking a few questions to correct my earlier picture.

Let’s make some TERF head explode…
Oh, wait, science never got in the way of their “scientific knowledge”.
There is not ONE set of criteria the encompasses everybody who is “woman” apart from “I say so”.

Yellow Thursday
Seconded!
I want a world where everybody can freely and happily choose from the pick ‘n’ mix of human experience and possibility.
I really loved how Anne Leckie dealt with the concept in Ancillary Justice: Everybody is “she”. While people are aware that there is different anatomy under the clothes they don’t give a fuck (class and race are much more interesting ways of oppression in that world) to the point that the protagonist constantly has difficulties telling the gender of people on planets where that is custom. As she is not trained to see gender and sex characteristics, she simply doesn’t see a pattern.

As nipples are (except for rare circumstances) only functional on females, their existence on males supports the idea that we start out on a female template, modified by later development for those individuals who function reproductively as sperm distributors.

You mean functional as in the role of nipples in reproduction, to nurse young, correct? Not functional as in pleasurable or given some sort of cultural meaning? Because that would mean…

As an anatomical phallus is most commonly only reproductively functional on male assigned at birth people, the existence of a phallus on female assigned at birth people supports the idea that we start out on a male template, modified by later development for those individuals who function reproductively as egg producers.

But that’s not the case. The existence of the clitoris doesn’t mean that we all start out on a male template. There are vestiges of development in multiple directions, because before sexual differentiation in the fetus all fetuses have the same physical traits. There are nipples, there is a phallus, there are gonadal ridges, two pairs of ducts, etc. In some cases development causes some structures to shrink away. In other cases, the structures remain.

Some paraphyletic groups are very useful, as long as you are aware that that’s what they are. Others ar ereally not…they obscure biological reality and give the erroneous impression that some groups are separate, like a paraphyletic use of dinosaurs or fish.
I’m fine with maintaining paraphyletic groups when useful, which happens in biology as well, but i’m definitely in favour of updating colloquial vocabulary to reflect known biological reality when the only thing preventing it is ignorance or an absurd attachment to “the way it’s always been”.

By the way, the two sexes model is also useful, as an aproximation that pretty much works most of the time. It doesn’t make it correct.

This is mostly an aside, but I was pleased with the Questionable Content forum mods for reiterating the rule that asking/talking about anyone’s genitals, character or commenter, was a bannable offense. Claire was comfortable showing her body to Martin, but that doesn’t mean it’s anybody else’s business.

azhael @ # 24: What about the clitoris? Is it evidence that we all start out as male?

What I’ve read on comparative anatomy for some reason neglects to cover that, so I have no basis to attempt generalizations there.

The Mellow Monkey @ # 25: Not functional as in pleasurable …

Our esteemed host, and most others who write on evolution (on a scientific basis – creationists don’t count) routinely describe how structures which serve one purpose get co-opted for others. Nipples as erogenous zones strike me as a near-ideal case example of that, and one where the primary/secondary classification makes sense.

Maybe I’ve got this wrong too, but I’ve read that nipples start out as sweat glands, greatly elaborated to express proteins and fats as well as the water and minerals their less-specialized counterparts secrete. For some doubtless stochastically-contingent reason, part of that elaboration occurs across the board, other parts only in the presence of estrogen (and, I guess, absence of androgen etc). Without a good look at the proto-shrews back in the Cretaceous, we may never know just how that got worked out; even if we could do that, it would surely raise more questions requiring us to go further back to collect specimens from the early-multicellular “invention of sex” era.

The evolution of birds from dinosaurs, with their “W” and “Z” sex chromosomes, indicate that mammals weren’t the only ones getting creative ~100MYA. The same sources I recall asserting that the female was the basic pattern among mammals also claimed that in the avian line, males form the core developmental group, of which females are a variation. With some reptiles and amphibians “deciding” their gender only after the eggs get laid, and certain plants having both sets of reproductive organs on a simultaneous, sequential, or circumstantial basis, we have to concede that simple generalizations just don’t apply universally even on this one planet.

I have to go take care of some business now – so, thanks in advance for all responses, but please be patient for my replies.

In sweden, they have more or less successfully introduced a neutral-gender word “Hen”, which is a derivative of “Han”(He) and “Hon”(She). This sounded really wrong and strange to me at first, but its an idea I like more and more.

I am Hornbeck’s complete lack of surprise. There’s something flattering about seeing “your” arguments show up in a major science publication (sometimes it’s nice to know things you “discovered” were already common knowledge among experts).

What I’ve read on comparative anatomy for some reason neglects to cover that, so I have no basis to attempt generalizations there.

That sucks. If what you’ve read hasn’t covered the comparative anatomy of the penis and the clitoris, then it sorely shortchanged you on how sexual development occurs. Nipples aren’t a good example of a “female template” guiding development, because we have lots of homologous structures between different sexes. The clitoris is one of them. While it may be repurposed for sexual pleasure and have cultural meaning assigned to it, it serves no reproductive purpose in humans.

The glans penis and the glans clitoris develop from the same phallic tubercle: the clitoris exists because the penis exists, because our bodies start with a human template and tweak it from there for reproduction.

The evolution of birds from dinosaurs, with their “W” and “Z” sex chromosomes, indicate that mammals weren’t the only ones getting creative ~100MYA. The same sources I recall asserting that the female was the basic pattern among mammals also claimed that in the avian line, males form the core developmental group, of which females are a variation. With some reptiles and amphibians “deciding” their gender only after the eggs get laid, and certain plants having both sets of reproductive organs on a simultaneous, sequential, or circumstantial basis, we have to concede that simple generalizations just don’t apply universally even on this one planet.

Hetero- and homogametic sex are actually a tangential topic from the physical development of a fetus. PZ stated that “we start out sexually indifferent”–regarding anatomical development–and you expressed doubt that this was true, by using an anatomical example. This is why the responses to you used other anatomical examples. Chromosomes are not the same thing as anatomy, though. That’s one of the points of the linked article and why a simple, binary sex system doesn’t capture the full complexity.

our cultural understanding of sex and our growing understanding of the biology of sex differ in profound ways. We are the lucky ones to be living in the time of transition. It is also pretty clear that we going through that same transition generally. The main conflict seems to be with the cultural understanding of the world and our growing scientific understanding of the world. As science education and science literacy becomes the rule and not the exception many of the conflicts we see will change. ( I hope)
The understanding of the real nature of people and sexuality and not the confining cultural ones might help to make relationships more personal instead of a status influencing one that many are now. Probably just a personal fantasy on mt part.
at least it is helping to eliminate those cultural derived physical standards of beauty that plague us and bug me. physical perfection makes no sense and is in conflict with what we observe in reality.
uncle frogy

This seems to fit in very well with Kinsey’s sexuality spectrum, where 0 is a person who identifies as totally straight and 7 is a person who identifies as totally gay. Most people fall somewhere in between, and I believe that this is what scares so many people, especially among the conservatives and religious people. They realize that they feel some attraction toward the same sex, and they lash out because it frightens them.
It seems to me that accepting that one is somewhere on the spectrum could make life a lot more fun and interesting.

Yet many other mammals do, and I doubt that difference involves either nursing or sex-play. So what does turn that on and off, and why?

The Mellow Monkey @ # 33: If what you’ve read hasn’t covered the comparative anatomy of the penis and the clitoris, then it sorely shortchanged you on how sexual development occurs.

I should have been more explicit – the “comparative anatomy” I referred to involved comparison of humans with other species, not intra-species sexual differences. Descriptions of (other) primates’ sexual anatomy and behavior rarely mentions the clitoris, and I don’t recall seeing mention of same for non-primates at all. Where is Dr. Tatiana when we need her?

… you expressed doubt that this was true, by using an anatomical example.

I intended to express that I had read differently, and wanted clarification on the disproof of the “claim” our esteemed host implies has been debunked. Though willing to accept my earlier sources were mistaken, I still want to know more about the particulars of this (settled(?)) debate.

@35
I think also there is fear and conflict of what overlap there is in appearance between what is seen as culturally accepted male and female characteristics. who has hair where and how much. voice tone range, size and shape of genitalia, size and body shape all have male type and female type connotations and much overlap that all confound the accepted social norms. add something as variable as behavior which is learned, well stereotypes be damned
uncle frogy

So much confusion and emphasis over such small details in an ultimate sense. There is a human template that gets modified in two general directions with respect to reproductive systems. The form of the template in physically male and female directions at that split contains a lot of variation that makes life more interesting. Sexual variation should not be a tool or focus of social conflict, but it is. That implicitly dehumanizes all of us.

@Pierce 29
In addition to certain reptiles sex being environmentally dependent in ovo, some fish species are able to change sex depending on population dynamics as adults. Female parrot fish can become male when needed.

@40 The Mellow Monkey
I had heard rumours about that! That’s just fantastic xD
Unrelated to lactation but quite interesting (at least to me), the other day someone posted in a forum dedicated to caudates about one of her female Notophthalmus viridescens, who despite being gravid and laying fertile eggs, was displaying male courtship behaviour, which in this species is quite specific so it’s not that it kinda looks like it, it’s the real deal.

@42 rp
A friend of mine since childhood claims that he produced small amounts of milk during puberty on a handful of occasions!

… one of my pet peeves, the claim that we all start out as female — we don’t, we start out sexually indifferent.

I had thought this claim held true, as evidenced by male nipples (in humans & other mammals). What about those?

Yes, those and if you read the post, there’s also stuff like:

the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing […] If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither.

Put these two together and you can see that any claim that we start out as exclusively “male” or “female” is mistaken.

I often shock the heck out of conservative types when I point out that the prostate shares developmental identity with a female version (Skene’s gland) located near where the G-spot gets argued about. Fun is fun, including watching people collapse into the most interesting rationalizations for believing what they already do.

This is incorrect. It doesn’t matter how many chromosomes you have in what cells as a definition of sex. The only thing that matters is what is needed to reproduce. If your a human, your either playing the role of female or the role of male in the game of the fusion of gametes, or you’re not participating. Although there are more sexes in other animals, in humans you’re male or female, or evolution won’t see you.

If you’re talking about how you act or interact, or your preferences, or your identity, you are talking about a confluence of biology and experience and culture and you are talking about gender. And – who knows? – maybe there are a thousands genders. Gender is how people see you.

But it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because we don’t need to turn to biology to justify the sorts of moral systems that we would like to enact on this planet. The very reason that this article focuses on the catchy words “now” and “change” is because it wants to be counted in the zeitgeist around changing gender politics. Without saying it aloud, the purpose of this article is justify a larger inclusion of all expressions of gender in our culture.

We can do that without relying on narratives based to some degree on the natural world. That is what this article is. It isn’t an objective assessment of a changing attitude toward sex among biologists, its a narrative to be used by an consumer of biology to validate a particular moral conclusion. But I don’t like that. Just as previous people were wrong to use biology to justify a binary view of gender, we don’t need to use biology now to justify a non-binary view of gender. The proper conclusion here is that we don’t need this article. Biology is biology and it exists whether or not humans are around struggling toward better moral systems. We treat people of any and all genders well, not because biology tells us this is “normal” or justified, but because they are people and that is what we have decided to do to live in a decent world. I am deeply uncomfortable with this article implicitly committing the same logical error that those other “binary gender” people did – that biology should ever be used to justify an approach to human moral conclusions.

I fall back to the Varley Sci-fi Titan/Demon/Wizard trilogy where the Titanians where 3-sexed Centaurs.

If I remember correctly there were only two sexes but each sex had three sets of sex organs of which only the fore was variable. (Hence binary sex classification.) Reproduction required double fertilization so there were 29 possible parenting possibilities (named for musical chords) including a single self fertilization.

Biology is biology and it exists whether or not humans are around struggling toward better moral systems. We treat people of any and all genders well, not because biology tells us this is “normal” or justified, but because they are people and that is what we have decided to do to live in a decent world.

You must be writing from the alternative universe that I do not inhabit to imagine that “[w]e treat people of any and all genders well … because they are people and that is what we have decided to do to live in a decent world”. The evidence is already in that ‘we’, or a significant proportion of humanity, do not treat other people well, and that many of us do not live in a decent world; and intersex and gender diverse people especially tend to find themselves on the end of oppressive and inhumane treatment in every country on the globe.

Apparently grouperfish believes that evolution ONLY works on individuals, and not populations, and thus evolution completely ignores any contributions to survival that people ‘not playing the game’ might provide. Because that’s totes logical and makes sense.

Grouperfish is also either an idiot, delusional, or willfully ignorant because they think that all humans and human societies treat everyone equally despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary.

@Rowan #51
I think grouper is right that the biology of sex, sexuality, and gender shouldn’t matter in how we treat people. He’s wrong about ‘playing the game’ bit. Additionally I think that showing that the biology of sex is more complicated than most people think is valuable in teaching people that our social constructs around sex and gender need changing.

If your a human, your either playing the role of female or the role of male in the game of the fusion of gametes, or you’re not participating. Although there are more sexes in other animals, in humans you’re male or female, or evolution won’t see you.

you say if you are human, but selection acts the same in humans as it does for every other sexually reproducing species.

Totally Normal™ people reproduce using the Missionary Position within a Marriage and have offspring who do not Conform®.
Alot of those offspring go on to reproduce anyoldway.
…
grouperfish
You didn’t read any of the ~40+ comments above your’s, did you?

A friend of mine since childhood claims that he produced small amounts of milk during puberty on a handful of occasions!

In fact, that is not an uncommon observation, and, rather laughably, the Supreme Court of the US just used the fact that males can rarely produce tiny quantities of milk as an irrational justification for businesses that want to deny women the right to breastfeed their kids at work. Evidently, see, since men can “produce milk” too, it would be discriminatory to only allow mommies to take breaks for that…

This is incorrect. It doesn’t matter how many chromosomes you have in what cells as a definition of sex.

So, we have the opinion of the experts on this field and we have the opinion of a randomn person on the internet. Whom should I believe now? People with degrees and research and expertise and stuff or somebody who walks in and declares them W-R-O-N-G?

The only thing that matters is what is needed to reproduce. If your a human, your either playing the role of female or the role of male in the game of the fusion of gametes, or you’re not participating. Although there are more sexes in other animals, in humans you’re male or female, or evolution won’t see you.

Who’s this evolution person and why do I need to see them? So, in humans you either have offspring or you don’t exist? We only exist in whether we pass on our genes or what? That doesn’t even make sense. What about people who have a perfectly working set of reproductive anatomy, but who never reproduce? What are they? And how do I know? And how much medical help are people who want to reproduce allowed to receive? If a new medical treatment comes up that allows a formerly infertile person to reproduce now, were they neither male nor female before but suddenly gained a sex when science caught up with their condition?

Biology is biology and it exists whether or not humans are around struggling toward better moral systems.

You need to define biology first. Do you mean the reality of living organisms or do you mean the science? Because the science is made by humans and humans don’t start out with a blank slate when they start doing science, but with all their biases and preconceptions and false ideas. Actually, the history of biology as a science is the perfect example of science being ideological and serving the dominant discourse.

We treat people of any and all genders well, not because biology tells us this is “normal” or justified, but because they are people and that is what we have decided to do to live in a decent world.

What colour is the sky on your planet? Because on planet earth people assigned female at birth are treated worse than people assigned male at birth* and people who don’t clearly tick either box frequently get murdered, like one trans woman every week in Europe and the USA since January.

*Have you ever noticed how nobody checks either chromosomes or whether the baby can succesfully produce gametes before that is done?

@46 grouperfish
First off, Xanthë’s @50.
Second of all, biological reality is not used as the basis, but as support. When the bigots start yelling against treating human beings with respect and affording them rights because “it’s unnatural!!!!1!!”, we can point to biological reality and say “no it’s not, fuck off”. It would be morally correct either way, but being able to support it with biological fact sure is helpful and, speaking as someone who is not considered normative and has suffered consequences for that, but who understands that biologically they are very natural indeed, it also feels nice.

I have a suspicion that what grouperfish meant to say was that we ought to “treat people of any and all genders well” irrespective of any and all biological attributes (not that we currently actually do treat people well), and that grouperfish didn’t like the article’s implication that we should base our morality on biology just because the biology supports our view; grouperfish thinks our morality should be independent of any biological considerations. Which is fair enough, if I’m right and that’s what grouperfish meant to say.
It’s unfortunate that they said it in such a way that it reads like almost the exact opposite of what they meant (if I’m right about their intentions, which of course I may not be).

Which is all very interesting but doesn’t really cover the part where most of these arguments are really about cognitive neurology; how a brain, a self, goes about identifying,recognizing, and preferring things or manages to wrangle it’s own fleshy casing through any given environment.

I tend to think of “sexuality” as a “preference” rather than an “identity”, which is more about somehow retrieving the pertinent information from a brain’s filed memory bank, and so I suspect this is where everthing starts going wrong in all these ridiculous online gender fights. We’re both saying “identity” but we mean really different things.

Also, knowing there are bodies built to withstand the metabolic stresses of gestation, those that really aren’t, and all the myriad in between, does jack shit about a binary ideal that’s outcome leaves us with a massive body count and most of our vital social infrastructure work being done for free, by women under duress.

Opposablethumbs: You are right. That is what I was trying to say. I don’t need an article about sex to support an approach to gender. People can be any gender and all genders irregardless of the particularities of how chromosomes get distributed in bodies. It just doesn’t matter.

I still think it’s useful, though, when bigots say “unnatural!” and “because NATURE, because BIOLOGY”, to be able to point out that what they’re saying is factually bollocks. So the bigot-version can be shot down as both irrelevant AND inaccurate.

opposablethumbs @65: That often doesn’t work, though. Bigots and fundies seem to have different definitions of “natural” depending about what they’re talking about. When trying to pin a religious relative down on what she meant by “homosexuality is unnatural,” she completely swept aside any evidence I produced that homosexuality is, in fact, natural (that it exists in nature). She finally admitted that “natural” is meant that it went along with what God wanted, or at least, what she believed God wanted. And since the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, that made it unnatural.

That’s when I decided I was wasting my time trying to bring her to reason.

the only result I have ever had with attempting to reason with people who are claiming truth or nature or some other obviously faith based talking point is to get them to admit by logical progression that it is in fact just a personal belief and not based on any objective reality at all. My patients is not often up to the task however.
uncle frogy

@Yellow Thursday #66
The unreachable will always be unreachable. The better we can demolish those arguments though, the more people we can reach and the better the eventual outcome will be. We need to keep bringing down more fence sitters onto our side and pushing the fence further and further back. More evidence like this helps at the margins.

There are some people who benefit from others being better educated and more accepting of the diversity of sex, though. Some people have their very existence erased or ignored or are subject to non-consensual surgeries because people think that articles about sex like this aren’t important. Some people are abused or killed because of this.

Diversity in sex development isn’t just about gender. It may be about diversity in sex development.

Again quoting grouperfish (this time it’s their later comment — 19 February 2015 at 6:13 am),

Opposablethumbs: You are right. That is what I was trying to say. I don’t need an article about sex to support an approach to gender. People can be any gender and all genders irregardless of the particularities of how chromosomes get distributed in bodies. It just doesn’t matter.

(My emphasis added.)
Thank you for your clarification. But there is still something wrong here, and it would do you well to either be clearer in what you say, or to go away and do some thinking about what people have said to you — your phrase “It just doesn’t matter” seems to read solipsistically as “it just doesn’t matter to me”, and dismisses the argument that the topic most certainly does matter in the real world – both to the people who persecute others based on this idea, as well as the persecuted (well, obviously). (That link is to the most recent report of the UN High Commissioner on the status of the human rights of LGBTI people, it’s a 2 megabyte PDF.)

I don’t know that spreading biological information about varieties of chromosome allotment or congenital adrenal disorder, etc helps decrease the oppression of individuals with these states. As PZ stated at the beginning of the post, these things are not new, and really have not been for a very long time. And I think that down a long road, reasoning along these lines is going to get us into quite an undesirable moral spot.

A cursory glance at the interwebs reveals that turner syndrome was described in 1938, and that klinefelter’s syndrome was described in 40’s and that the chromosomal foundation of these syndromes was known in the late 50’s. CAH has been documented and understood medically for over a century. No doubt, even in the middle of the 20th century, most of doctors in the US and Europe had read cases of intersex individuals and were familiar with these intersex states. Yet, people were still mistreated. Mistreatment of people with intersex bodies by medical professionals did not happen because of a lack of information about the biology. To the contrary, such information made some medical professionals more certain about “how to fix it” to meet their cultural standards.

The reason that actions to push intersex bodies into a sex binary was/is atrocious is not because intersex is its own sex and therefore changing it trangresses biology, but rather because real intersex people with thoughts and feeling and identities got irrevocably hurt from the process. We now widely recognize these actions as wrong, not because we have a better documentation of the biological pathways that lead to intersex conditions, but rather for several reasons having to do with changing culture and morals: 1) people are less likely to assign acceptable states of bodies based on a strict interpretations of religions, 2) people have been educated that identity and gender (and race and disability and illness) are either entirely or to a certain degree cultural constructions and so we have power over them and are responsible for them, 3) people have tended, even if remaining within a traditional religions, to further base their moral systems on some version of humanism, where empathy and reciprocity are the cornerstones. It’s not the information that changed (even though there is much more of it now), its the culture that did. Helping individuals with intersex bodies isn’t about spreading biological information, its about changing cultural attitudes and helping people connect through empathy.

Here is the sticky part. I am not comfortable with the claim that if something is natural it is inherently morally justified. That is the implicit argument of the Nature article. It should be pretty obvious that
there is a lot of variety in the biological scope of what it means to be human that we shouldn’t honor as morally justified just because we are “born that way.” Psychopathology and narcissism, a tendency toward hierarchies and dominance, tendencies toward violence, tendencies toward wishful or religious thinking are all things that have or could have biological components that nonetheless are things that are not or have components that are not morally justifiable.

If we continue to try to justify things morally using an “its biologically unavoidable!” approach, what will we say when confronted with something biologically based that doesn’t fit our humanist standards? The solution is just to avoid the biological justification from the get go and always focus on the humanism.

For the curious, I am also not a fan understanding sexual orientation as a function of “born that way”. One can think what ever they want I guess, but being gay or lesbian or queer, etc is easily justifiable just by consent, adulthood and the human rights of bodily autonomy and free expression. Saying that something is essentially morally justifiable just because you are born a certain way strikes me is deist, and I can’t see any way around that. As Lady Gaga says: “cause God makes no mistakes, I’m the the right track, baby, I was born this way.” As an atheist is that a conclusion one should support?

What point would there be in even pretending to have an ethical debate from a standpoint of sheer ignorance about the science that informs the issue – which would appear to be the inevitable outcome of not educating the public on these matters?

This seems to fit in very well with Kinsey’s sexuality spectrum, where 0 is a person who identifies as totally straight and 7 is a person who identifies as totally gay.

6, actually; and it’s explicitly not about self-identification, it’s about feeling attractions.

It can’t deal with nonbinary or asexual people, in case you’re wondering.

Yet many other mammals do [have nipples when male], and I doubt that difference involves either nursing or sex-play. So what does turn that on and off, and why?

In those male rodents, development nipple development is actively switched off. AFAIK, we don’t even have that switch. Perhaps the amount of time or energy saved from not growing and maintaining useless nipples makes a difference to a small, fast-living mouse, but not to larger mammals?